How Leadership Development Programs Can Succeed

by Seth Sinclair

The January 2014 issue of McKinsey Quarterly included an article that exposed what may be called the “dirty little secret” of the training industry.  (McKinsey Quarterly is the business publication of McKinsey and Company, a global management-consulting firm.) Despite the fact that American companies spend nearly $14 billion every year on leadership development programs, the article argues many such programs fail to develop strong and capable leaders. 

In their article, “Why Leadership-development Programs Fail,” authors Pierre Gurdjian, Thomas Halbelsen, and Kevin Lane describe four common mistakes those who organize and develop leadership development programs make—and provide useful strategies to avoid those pitfalls.  The issues they identify include:

Overlooking context: Leaders who do well in one kind of situation don’t necessarily do well in another.  Gurdjian, Halbelson, and Lane cite the example of a CEO who “had an outstanding record when markets were growing quickly, but…failed to provide clear direction or impose financial discipline on the group’s business units during the most recent economic downturn.”  Instead, the CEO continued to encourage innovation and new thinking, as he had previously done, until he was replaced for underperforming.  To combat this, the authors believe, companies need to precisely define the skills they require of their leaders at this point in time, and to develop a program that will teach those particular skills.

Decoupling reflection from real work: Some leadership programs offer participants the opportunity to step back from their day-to-day tasks and look at the big picture.  On the other hand, write the authors, “adults typically retain just 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing.”  It’s difficult to both push training participants to reflect while also giving them the opportunity to develop their skills through real work experiences.  The solution?  “Companies should strive to make every major business project a leadership-development opportunity as well, and to integrate leadership-development components into the projects themselves.”

Underestimating mind-sets: Reaching new levels of leadership performance, the authors acknowledge, requires uncomfortable changes to behavior.  Deeply held mindsets need to shift—and trainers need to go deeper into the thoughts and actions of leaders in order to change the way people see the world and their values.  “No pain, no gain”, they write, is as true in executive training as it is in training world-class athletes.

Failing to measure results: The authors’ final point is one we at Sinclair Advisory Group have frequently made: that “companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills, but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment.”  Participant feedback is not enough to evaluate leadership development programs—organizations must assess the extent of behavioral change the program has provided, perhaps with 360-degree feedback exercises at regular intervals.  Another good suggestion is to monitor participants’ career development after the program compared to employees who did not take part.  They also suggest that business metric impacts, such as cost savings and additional sales, can also quantify leadership program success.

While the authors mention coaching at several points during the article, their focus is generally on larger-scale leadership development programs for groups.  It seems to us, however, that one-on-one executive coaching is a proven way to avoid each of the pitfalls they cite, and to increase the likelihood that the billions of dollars invested by companies and organizations are spent wisely.

Great executive coaches do not see themselves as teachers, but as partners in the journeys of those they coach.  By helping clients define their own goals, asking the kinds of questions that help them understand the issues they face, and supporting them as they develop plans to solve problems, executive coaches are able to understand the context in which individual leaders operate.  They are also able to give leaders space to reflect on their lives and philosophies and to integrate those reflections into a real work context.

By looking at their clients’ interactions with others, and their entire lives and lifestyles (including wellness issues), coaches learn how to understand their clients’ mindsets and how their personalities and actions help them or hinder them.  Only this level of understanding can help leaders change unwelcome behaviors, and get them out of real and perceived ruts.   

And finally, the best executive coaches understand that bottom line of any coaching program is tangible results for both the individual and the organization.  In a previous blog post, we wrote about the importance of developing a coaching agreement—the process through which the relationship between a coach, a client, and an organization is designed and planned.  Every coaching agreement should establish the goals and parameters for the coaching relationship, and set expectations—including expectations for concrete results—that drive the relationship forward.

If it is true, as Messrs. Gurdjian, Halbelsen, and Lane suggest, that “only 7 percent of senior managers polled by a UK (United Kingdom) business school think their companies develop global leaders effectively,” then companies and organizations need to look more deeply into the use of executive coaches as partners for their leaders and candidates for leadership.  Coaching can address each of the issues the authors identify and provide an ideal strategy to increase the odds of successful leadership development.

Obstacles to Strong Listening Skills

by Everett A. Chasen

In Seth’s recent posts, Defining Coaching Presence and Levels of Listening, he wrote about the importance of strong listening skills in any coaching relationship.  But assuming that a person has reasonable hearing ability and fluency in the language being spoken, why should it be a difficult task to understand and retain the words of people who are talking to you?

In my book, The Manager's Communication Toolbox, my co-author Bob Putnam and I offer five reasons why strong listening skills are hard to develop and to use.  They include:

Lack of Motivation: In our modern era of multi-tasking and easily available diversions such as those every smart phone contains, it’s not unusual to find that you’re not very interested in what someone else is saying.  Coaches and clients, however need to make an affirmative decision that they want to, indeed must, listen closely to everything the other says—and make the commitment to do so effectively.

Distraction: Even if you’ve decided to listen intently, holding your attention on the words a client or a counselor is saying can be like “a house trailer clinging to its lot in a tornado.”  External stimuli, such as ambulance or fire sirens or music playing softly in an adjacent room or office, or internal stimuli, such as a speaker’s appearance or clothes, can easily distract you.

Speed difference:  There’s a significant gap between the speed of speech and the speed of listener comprehension.  The average person speaks at a rate of 110 to 150 words per minute—while the average listener can process 300 words per minute and retain full comprehension.  So about half the time you’re listening, you can be thinking of something else—hopefully about what you’ve heard, but possibly other, unrelated thoughts.  If you’ve got time on your hands during a conversation, use it to process the kinds of feedback information Seth described in his Levels of Listening post.

Emotional reactions: Even if you are sharply focused, you may have a strong reaction to something that’s been said.  When that happens, your thoughts may mildly digress—possibly taking you for a brief trip down memory lane—or they may sharply veer into a strong emotion.  Whether it’s a mild or a significant digression, the danger is that you will “tune out” the speaker for a short or longer period of time.

One-upmanship: Some listeners simply cannot resist the temptation to “one-up” or “me, too” a story, and will interrupt a speaker to tell their own tale.  That may sometimes be appropriate in a coaching situation—but if a speaker is telling his or her story to make a larger point, even thinking about a “one-up” story can be a barrier to effective listening.

Hopefully, simply being aware of these problems is the first step towards dealing with it.  Coaches and clients alike should understand these tendencies, and do all they can to avoid them.   Avoiding these pitfalls is a major step towards developing the kinds of strong listening skills every coach should have—and every client should strive for.

Levels of Listening

by Seth Sinclair

The famously taciturn President Calvin Coolidge once said, “no man ever listened himself out of a job,” but most people don’t really listen very well. 

On average, employees spend about a third of each working day listening to others talk.  Immediately after listening, most employees understand and retain about half of what they hear; after 48 hours, retention falls to about 25 percent.  For most employees, poor listening is a huge waste of time and a lost opportunity for information transfer—and it has a seriously negative effect on workplace relationships.  Imagine how disastrous it would be if a coach’s listening skills were that poor.

By contrast, good listening encourages intimacy, and makes people feel safe and secure.  Good listening is essential to developing both trust and strong coaching presence, as we mentioned in our posts on both subjects.  Great coaches are, without exception, great listeners—and great listening is a skill that can be learned.

The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), whose leaders developed a model of practice called “co-active coaching,” describes three levels of listening:

Internal Listening (Level 1): This type of listening is defined as “listening to the sound of their own inner voice.  (Listeners) may hear the words of the other person, but they are primarily aware of their own opinions, stories, judgments—their own feelings, needs, and itches.”  At this level, listeners are paying attention to their own interior dialogue: they’re hungry, they’re bored, they’re thinking about what they should say the next time there is a pause in the conversation.  In short, they are thinking about themselves, not the person with whom they are conversing.  CTI believes this isn’t a bad place for clients to be—the whole idea of the coaching experience is to focus on them and their needs—but coaches need to function at a higher level.

Focused Listening (Level 2): CTI calls this level “a hard focus, like a laser, from coach to client.”  They offer the example of two young lovers on a park bench: the rest of the world can do as it pleases, and they don’t care in the slightest—their full attention is focused on every word, every gesture, every nuance of the other person.  This is the level at which coaches need to listen and work—all the time.

Global Listening (Level 3): Listening at this level is equivalent to what performers do when they are performing: being attuned not only to words and gestures, but also to underlying moods and tone.  Comedians, especially, are very sensitive to how their words are being received, and whether their jokes are going over properly: if not, the best comedians will quickly change their set to adjust to the evening’s mood.  Coaches, too, need to be able to pick up on what’s not said by their clients—and to use that information to guide the discussion. 

In Level 3 listening, coaches should also be able to listen for organizational cues and context, not just cues from clients.  They should be able to pick up on and be in tune with the prevailing strategies and attitudes that make up their clients’ environment.  Being able to do this will help the coach and client to partner together in support of the organization’s goals.

CTI believes that coaches should function at levels 2 and 3 in all of their interactions with those they are coaching—but understands there are times when even coaches will fall back to level 1 and be thinking about their own agendas.  The trick is to recognize when that happens, and to find their way back to higher level of listening.  “Sometimes,” they conclude, “all it takes is asking a provocative, curious, question.”